


Way Leads On to Way

by thesaddestboner



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Detroit Tigers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-03
Updated: 2011-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:50:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesaddestboner/pseuds/thesaddestboner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Rick thinks about a million different ways his life could have gone.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Way Leads On to Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inplayruns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inplayruns/gifts).



> [](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/inplayruns/profile)[**inplayruns**](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/inplayruns/) prompted me in a meme to write “genderswap Porcello/Scherzer, but with Max as the girl :O” comment fic and, because I'm me, I took that idea and ran with it. 
> 
> This has nothing to do with the girl!Porcello ’verse. 
> 
> Title from the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.” 
> 
> Minor edits have been made.
> 
> You can find me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/thesaddestboner) and [tumblr](http://saddestboner.tumblr.com).

Rick thinks about a million different ways his life could have gone.

He probably could have been a pro ballplayer if a few things had gone his way. He was picked in the first round of the Rule IV draft, but it apparently wasn’t high enough. He should have been a top ten pick, his agents told him, but he’d somehow fallen through the cracks all the way to twenty-seven. They advised him to take the free ride North Carolina was dangling over his head, instead, build up his stock and he could be a consensus number one in a few years.

It made sense to Rick and his parents to wait for the big bucks, so he turned down the Tigers’ generous offer (for a late first rounder, at least) and took the scholarship.

And a couple months into his freshman season, he blew out his elbow and had to get Tommy John surgery.

A few years after that—June of his senior year at UNC—while scouting directors were calling his former TarHeels teammates’ names, conscripting them for service, Rick was finishing up his business degree and rubbing the aches out of his right elbow every night. He was never right after the surgery, lost a whole year to recovery, and by that point, the team had moved on. They had younger, healthier pitchers lining up to take his place.

Right now, he’s in some glitzy dance club in Palm Beach. Most of the colleges and universities are on spring break. It isn’t the best time to be down here, and he probably should have thought about that before he came out. He’s never been that impulsive either, never been the kind of guy to just decide, suddenly, that he wants to go to Palm Beach and actually see it through.

All the bars are overstuffed, teeming with eager, hard-bodied college girls and frat-boys on the prowl. He’s watching a guy and girl right now, dancing around each other, flashing hungry eyes and predatory smiles. It’s like an elaborate mating ritual. Rick feels fortunate he missed out on this during his college days, when he was worrying himself sick over his elbow, and then throwing himself into his business degree after he lost his scholarship because of the injury.

 _During his college days_. Rick laughs quietly into his half-empty glass of beer. He’s thinking like he’s forty; he’s only twenty-two, a year out of UNC. His teammates did always say he was a little old for his age.

Rick sets his glass down, empty now, and flags down the bartender for a refill.

Someone brushes up against his elbow and he glances over. A tall, thin girl in a plain t-shirt and khaki shorts sets a purse down on the bar and settles on one of the stools.

“Hi,” Rick says to her, nodding. He offers his hand. “I’m Rick.”

The girl looks at him and then his hand before accepting it, as if she thought he might be hiding razors in his shirtsleeves or something. “Hi, Rick. Max.”

“Max?” Rick slips his hand away and wraps it around his fresh drink. His elbow barks painfully and he rubs at it, even though he knows by now that won’t do any good. “Short for something?”

“Just Max,” she says, shrugging. “My parents liked the name.”

“Okay, just Max.” Rick smiles at her and looks back at his glass, and then the tiny dish of mixed nuts the bartender has placed in front of him. He grabs a few before pushing the dish over to Max.

“Thanks.” She takes some and tosses them into her mouth.

Rick gives her a once-over while she’s ordering her drink; he supposes she’s almost kind of cute, in a strange sort of way. She’s not conventionally pretty by any stretch of the imagination—she’s kind of thin, a little on the gangly side, and she’s got a big, beakish nose that makes her look almost birdlike—but that’s not what catches his eye.

It’s her _eyes_ that catch his eye, weirdly enough. They’re two different colors: one is dark brown, the color of the dregs in Rick’s coffee pot, and the other is the clearest blue he’s ever seen, even clearer than the skies in Vermont in the winter.

“Your eyes,” he says, “they’re—”

“Heterochromia,” she says, cutting him short, the tone of her voice telling him she’s probably been asked this question a million times. Rick must have a stupid questioning look on his face because she laughs and flips her hair behind her shoulders. “It’s a genetic thing.”

“Oh,” Rick says, cheeks warming in embarrassment. He ducks his head. “Well, it’s cool.”

Max laughs again. “Thanks, Rick.”

He glances back at his drink. “You here for spring break?”

“No. I don’t think you are either. You look a little old to be hanging out with college kids,” she says, her tone light, teasing.

He looks back at her. “I’m only a year out of college.”

Max nods slowly, pursing her lips. “I didn’t mean to say you, like, look old or anything, it’s just—”

“Nah, it’s cool.” Rick waves her apologies off. “They always say I’m too serious for my age.”

Max runs her finger around the rim of her glass. The contents are rich, dark, maybe rum or whiskey. “They?”

“My ex-teammates. I used to play college ball.” Rick leaves out the part where he only played for a couple months before his body betrayed him.

Her different colored eyes light up like a pinball machine at that. “Oh, were you drafted?”

“Yeah,” Rick says, “first round.” It feels kind of cool to be bragging, even if he’s never going to set foot on a Major League pitcher’s mound, even if his baseball career was over before it began.

“That’s really cool,” Max says, smiling at him. “I’m a big baseball fan, myself. I’m from Missouri, Redbirds all the way.”

Rick laughs. “Mets for me.”

Max shakes her head, still smiling. “Guess we have to hate each other. 2006 and all.” The Mets had beaten the Cards in seven in the NLCS that year. “You seem like a nice guy, though.”

Rick smiles genuinely, for what feels like the first time in a while. Definitely the first time since he left his Chapel Hill apartment a couple days ago with nothing but his car, wallet, iPad, and a small carry-on of clothes.

“That’s too bad, because I was kind of starting to like you,” Rick says, stirring his pinkie finger in his drink, pushing the ice cubes around in the glass.

“What a shame, ’cause I was starting to like you too.”

Rick looks at her again and she looks right back, meeting his gaze. “You wanna get out of here? We c—”

“We just met,” she says, rolling her eyes at him. “I’m not going to hook up with you.”

“No, I mean, it’s crowded here, and I’m kind of sick of all these college idiots.” Rick waves his hand at the college kids gyrating on the dance floor.

She shrugs. “Sure, why not?”

Once their tabs have been taken care of, the two of them leave and start walking for the parking lot, where Rick’s stashed his beat-up old Ford Explorer. Every now and then, Max brushes against his bad elbow, and it takes everything in him not to cry out in pain or rub it—you’re never supposed to rub it—but he manages. Max makes it easy; she’s easy to talk to, funny in a _dude_ sort of way.

Rick trusts her instantly, as naïve and potentially dangerous as that is. He’s not a silly kid with his head up in the clouds, though. The injury changed that, helped him develop a tough outer skin. It’s just—she feels familiar, kind of like the guys he used to play with when he was younger. Brazenly funny, kind of thoughtful at the same time, always ready with a comeback or quip.

Rick pauses by his SUV and digs out his keys. “You have a ride?”

“Yeah, it’s over there.” Max gestures to a sleek, silver sports car a few spots down. She drops her arm and looks at Rick. “Where are you headed now? Back to North Carolina?”

Rick shrugs and flips the keys from hand to hand. “Yeah, probably. I’ve got a job. It kind of sucks, but it pays the bills.”

“What do you do?”

“I coach a tee ball team,” Rick says. “The economy sucks so hard right now, I’ve been trying for months to get a job in my field, but I can’t get anything. I’ve been sending out my resumes everywhere. Someone’s got to bite, right?”

“Right,” Max says, shoving her hands in the pockets of her shorts. “You’ll find something.”

Rick rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and turns to unlock the driver’s side door. “Hopefully.”

“What happened to your elbow? Baseball injury?” Max asks, beyond his shoulder.

Rick looks back at her. “Yeah. Blew out my elbow freshman year at UNC. Ended up losing my scholarship.”

Max winces in sympathy. “Does it still hurt? I noticed you were rubbing it a lot.”

“It acts up every now and then, doc that sewed me up says there’s probably scar tissue in there that needs breaking up.” Rick rubs his elbow as if on cue and sighs. “Sometimes I wonder what life might be like, you know? If I hadn’t blown out my elbow, or if I’d signed out of high school.”

“You shouldn’t think like that,” Max says.

“Why not?” Rick asks.

Max reaches out, almost tentatively, and lays her hand lightly over Rick’s on his elbow. “You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

They stand there, silent, and the humid air around them feels even heavier, weighty. This is one of those moments, he thinks, a moment where he has choices, forks in the road.

And he chooses.

Rick slips his hand out from under hers and touches her cheek. She’s got a spray of freckles that stretches across the bridge of her nose, curves over the rounds of her cheeks. He leans in and brushes his lips lightly over hers. She doesn’t move to hit him or push him back, but she doesn’t really kiss him back either, and he hopes he hasn’t completely misread the situation. He steps back and pulls his hand away from her cheek.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t, I hope you don’t—” he begins, but she interrupts.

“Don’t apologize,” she says, the corners of her mouth curving up slightly in a smile. “I meant what I said before, I’m not going to hook up with you. But I like you.” Max wraps her hand around Rick’s and pulls him back to peck him on the lips. “How about we exchange numbers, and go from there?”

Rick smiles, cheeks warming again, but not from embarrassment this time. “Okay, that sounds good to me,” he says. He pulls a pen out of his pocket and Max offers her palm to him. He scribbles down his phone number one one of the lines in her palm and curls her fingers around the pen.

Max takes his hand in hers, gently, and does the same. Her handwriting is tall, spiky, thin. Kind of like her, Rick thinks, as he watches her slash her t’s and dot her i’s.

When she’s finished, she tucks the pen in his pocket. “I’ll call you sometime,” she says, her voice full of promise.

Rick’s smile widens. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Max steps away and heads for her car. He watches after her, lips still buzzing from the kiss, fingers tingling from the feel of her hand. Maybe he’s imagining it. He isn’t sure anymore.

For a split second, he thinks of going after her, asking to go wherever she’s going too, or asking her to come with him to North Carolina. He’s not impulsive, though. Not even for a guy who drops everything to go to Palm Beach for the weekend.

He looks down at his hand, the ink on his skin. _Carpe diem, Rick! You’d better call me!!_ and then her phone number. He hears the low rumble of an engine, and when he looks back up, she’s pulling out of the lot.

Rick curls his hand closed, around the phone number and message.

**Author's Note:**

> The author of this piece intends no insult, slander, or copyright infringement, and is not profiting from this work. This story is a complete work of fiction and does not necessarily reflect on the nature of the individuals featured. This is for entertainment purposes only. If you found this story while Googling your name or the names of your friends, hit the back button now.


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